Comments on: The “Flat” Approach To Languages With Tons of Inflection

By: Trixz

Trixz — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 12:00:05 +0000

Ah I need to correct myself. I meant four categories of masculine, feminine and neuter.. so there’s even more to it!

However, most native speakers don’t even know the rules, it just sounds right. Reading a good book will help you much more than trying to figure out something as obscure as grammar. For example in Slovenian, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to learn the proper word order in a sentence by studying grammar, since not much of it is based on rules. You can often juggle the words around in a sentence and it won’t change the basic meaning at all, just nuances. That’s another paradox of grammar – half of it is composed of a multitude of complicated rules, the other half are exceptions! You can only learn all of that with a massive amount of input.

Come to think of it, as complicated as our grammar can be, we don’t even USE the past perfect tense, ever! The only place you’ll see it is in grammar books. Just imagine some foreign student who’d actually spend time trying to learn something that is completely useless in a language. シ

By: Trixz

Trixz — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 23:11:35 +0000

I can give you an example of my mother language – Slovenian. 6 inflections, present, future, past and past perfect tense, singular, dual and plural with each having 4 subclasses. Now multiply it across every category to get the possible combinations… yeah, good luck learning that with a grammar book.

I’ve met plenty of stundents studying Slovenian at my university in Austria. After three years 90 % couldn’t properly read out loud even the most basic sentences. As a consequence their grammar was horrible as well and no amount of grammar books would help them until they fixed the basics. What good are complicated theoretical tools to discuss a language (grammar rules) if you can’t handle even the basic framework, ie have a decent command of a language?

By: Learn Words in Steps | Jeff弁

Learn Words in Steps | Jeff弁 — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 21:01:57 +0000

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By: Cathryn Mataga

Cathryn Mataga — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:18:45 +0000

Ooh, Finnish. I want to learn Finnish also, as my mother and grandmother spoke Finnish, and I spent a a summer in Finland as a child. Of course, in my ill-spent youth I picked up absolutely nothing, but maybe some sounds are buried in my brain somewhere? I have started this language, but I’ve been pretty busy with work and Japanese for the last 3 years, so progress is slow. In addition to English, my father speaks Japanese, and my mother spoke Finnish. For Japanese, err, let’s just say I’m a long way from that ‘job interview’ Katz keeps talking about, but I have no one to blame other than my own lazy self.

Anyway, so far what is difficult is just reading anything in Finnish. A dictionary is pretty difficult to use since the stem modifications can be tricky. Also compound words seem to get abbreviated into a thing that is in no dictionary anywhere. I use use a site called ‘sanakirja.org‘ that shows ‘almost matched’ words. Also, I’ve turned to the dark side and purchased a grammar book. This has many sample sentences with translations. Maybe I’m just weird, but I find grammar books endlessly fascinating. Facebook has a ‘Finish Sentence of the Day’ group. Maybe SRSing these might be useful?

There is an irc channel ##FinnishLanguageSupport on freenode. (Note 2 ##) It isn’t so active, but there is a Finnish guy there who don’t mind helping now and then. I’ve also found a fair amount of Finnish language on Quakenet and IRCnet. I say nothing, but I do sometimes read and try to decode what’s going on.

Thanks to websites of questionable legality, I have amassed a pretty decent collection of Finnish movies. Most of these are for Finnish consumption and have no tempting English subtitles to distract me. I have yet to find a really good movie in Finnish. My problem might be poor listening comprehension. The most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen is the Finnish language season of Madventures. Unfortunately, later seasons were created in English. Boo.

By: 星空

星空 — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:02:56 +0000

besides duct tape and 42, the answer to all our problems is
stop thinking and just DO IT!

everything starts to click, if you just stop thinking about how it clicks.
just accept that it does.
understand the links b/w said words {eg. go & went} AFTER THE FACT

for example:
I have taken latin much longer than “studying” japanese and went through all 10 layers of hell, 地獄,天国,米国 and a few other places, and back, trying to *CONSIOUSLY* figure out how the J subjunctive worked. [<-technical word for hypothetical: would/could/may/might, etc.]
at least 2 years after the original thought, i got it to work on the concious level.
the only subjunctives J has are shitara and sureba, which are both "if"'s.
just *1* of those in the paragraph, in the conversation, just ONE,can make
the WHOLE THING hypothetical!
and yet the only things i used classified as finite verbs.
And I had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE for 3 STRAIGHT *YEARS*!!!!

stop thinking stop thinking ｓとｐ　てぃんきんｇ　ストプ　ティンキング　考え止まって　考えないで　思わずに　思うな！　しゃべってなら　作動するから　
just babble, it works　

(^w^)

By: 星空

星空 — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:12:59 +0000

@ seth
causative = make/let me do it クッキーを焼かせる（/下さい）
passive = it was done　クッキーが焼かれました。
すみません、ちょっと腹減った。

By: Feanaro Surion

Feanaro Surion — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:30:02 +0000

I’d just like to point out that the difficulty to this approach is that there is only one word in the dictionary, and the 14 cases in both singular and plural all just have to be recognized. That does mean though that every case needs representation in SRS, as you say, but for slightly different reasons in my opinion. The patterns need to be recognized as part of a single word. They exist as part of that word. There’s no getting around it. But unless the recognition is almost instant, the meaning won’t be known properly anyway. The only implication that has upon sentences is that for the ones that you do end up picking, you need to make damn sure that you’re going to understand what’s going on with the word, or with that inflection, because if you don’t, you’re sunk, grammar or no grammar. With enough exposure, the cases sort themselves out. In fact, they really have no meaning without a sentence, but in the contexts of a sentence, it’s easy to see what a word is doing. Even if I have no clue what the word itself means, I have a clue as to what it’s doing. In that way, cases could probably be treated as particles easily enough, as long as the changes to the original word are observed.

By: Lindsey

Lindsey — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 05:51:37 +0000

Hey, could you alter your site code to stop forcing separate windows or tabs to open when a link is clicked? It ends up taking more RAM than necessary.

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By: Conjugation Doesn’t Exist! | Daily Chinese Mnemonic - Beta

Conjugation Doesn’t Exist! | Daily Chinese Mnemonic - Beta — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:00:12 +0000

[…] The “Flat” Approach To Languages With Tons of Inflection “OK, first of all, I have a secret (the secret, the secret) to tell you. Come closer. Closer. ‘K, here we go:” […]

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:15:46 +0000

You’ll quickly find that the cases in Finnish are by no means terrifying…in fact the only difference between the cases of Finnish and the particles of Japanese are that when you attach the “particle”/case ending stuff sometimes happen to the original word. They’re just as easy to use though, and generally pretty easy to recognize. In fact…the only problem they might cause for people is being able to look a word up in a dictionary, because when you find a word looking like “alusta” you don’t know that it’s probably actually the word “alku” in disguise (it could be other words too though…). A really useful website to get around this problem is www2.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/fintwol , you can put any word as you find it in Finnish and it tells you what word to look up in the dictionary! It also tells you other things like what case it is in…or tense…or singular or plural, but you don’t really need most of that exactly like Khatz describes!

By: Eldon

Eldon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:29:33 +0000

Captal:

That site rocks, cheers 😀

By: The Chosen One

The Chosen One — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:04:32 +0000

My guess is that the vast majority of words will only be used in one or two particular cases each (for example: ‘air strike’ is usually used as a noun, but the other day I heard someone say ‘they got air stricken’ and I laughed for about 10 minutes straight because of how funny that sounded…. although grammatically correct, I think, most of all words will only be heard in one particular pattern). Only the most common words will be used in all cases, so in the end, it probably turns out that Finish has just about the same amount of “stuff” to learn as all other languages.

By: NDN

NDN — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:32:11 +0000

Makes a lot of sense. Indeed, in many sentences I would just write the meaning of a verb in it’s infinitive(?) although that verb in the sentence was in a modified(?) form. And then I would struggle every time I reviewed those sentences. Some weeks ago I started applying this “flat” approach and just write the meaning of the verb in the infinitive and in the tense in which it appears in the actual sentence.

Example:

Question:
研ぎ澄まされた五感から生み出せる

Answer:
研ぎ澄まされる【とぎすまされる】 (v5s) to be sharpened
研ぎ澄ます【とぎすます】 (v5s) to sharpen
五感【ごかん】 (n) the five senses
生み出せる【うみだせる】 (v5s)can produce
生み出す【うみだす】 (v5s)to produce

And then I just let my brain work. 🙂

By: Ramses

Ramses — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:39:33 +0000

Sorry for plugging my own site, but back in February I write an article about exactly the same thing. Maybe some people think it’s and interesting read.

www.spanish-only.com/2009/02/how-to-ignore-grammar/

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:09:01 +0000

Aweseome. Aweseome, awesome, awesome. I’ve been following you for nine months now with my study of Finnish, and this is just what I needed at this moment- a reminder that, despite all the emphasis on grammar in the boks, and the supposed “regularity” of the rules, you DON”T actually need an example of every single case in order to use them.

Very timely and extremely helpful!
For me, the most helpful thing I’ve done is increase my vocabulary, using picture flashcards; the Finnish version of learning Kanji 🙂

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:20:13 +0000

In reference to what Seth mentioned above, I always get a little nervous that I’ll never be able to find the meaning of a verb in a certain conjugation or form WITHOUT the use of grammar structures. Perhaps it’s like an over attachment to an old girlfriend, but I feel it’s really hard to let go of it because it provides form and function so readily. Granted, I’m studying Chinese right now and there’s just ‘sentence patterns’, however, I want to pursue other languages and this has been a stumbling block for me on just how to go about it, without any formal grammatical training (e.g. class).

By: きのこ

きのこ — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:54:04 +0000

I noticed he took the “passion” out of it :p

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:41:16 +0000

Eldon:

I noticed it too. I guess I got accustomed to the way it used to look, and always skipped over it (sorry Khatz! I bought the QRG though!), but now that it’s different it jumps out at me. Weird.

Huh… getting used to things through repeated exposure, such that the underlying patterns become second nature. I feel like I’ve read about this somewhere before.

(On another topic: My First Sentence Pack is due to be released today, apparently! Who else is totally stoked for this?)